Banking Crisis.

Valleyboy

That is so funny I had a really good laugh at that.

Even though I am crying inside as my shares are with HBOS .

I know we should not laugh at the money crisis ,but we have to keep smiling being miserable won't alter anything.

missgemini
I think there's a lot like you Beacon Girl!! We gave a lot of savings away, whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, is how you look at it, but what we did have left, would not have increased with the present situation, so we had it out and put elsewhere!! It's the ones with their pensions that I am thinking of - like us. You work hard to put money away for your retirement, and it's taken away from you, by the very people who supposed to help you. I think the farmers knew best and kept their money under the bed!!

Speak soon Beacon Girl!!

Hi, so glad someone mentioned pensions, because the loss of pensions have been going on for a lot longer than our banking crisis, and until it hit a major company in Cardiff no one in the government cared a damn. The shortfall in Cardiff hit such large headlines the government did step in (only to save their own face) to help those poor guys that had faithfully looked forward to their old age by paying towards it.

I had been fighting for mine for a long time before this happened, after going up every avenue possible, my last resort was going to the local MP who forwarded to the correct department (this was in the year 2000)

My reply from the House of Commons was I quote “We do not deal with individual cases”
I WAS GOBSMACKED AS IT WAS THE INDIVIDUALS VOTE THAT PUT THEM IN POWER, and I am sure we were not alone, as small companies all over the UK were folding and vast amounts of small pensions folding with them.

At last in 2008 The FAS stepped in and a few months ago received the poultry sum of £30 per month. Taxed £6, leaving us with £24. (We are still trying to find out how we are being taxed on a basic pension as our savings had gone during several years of retirement)
As we were receiving pension credits the full amount of £30 were deducted from our credits, which leaves us £6 minus. I feel sick at the thought that I started paying into a pension in the seventies, only to be penalised in my old age.

I feel as if my bank closed the day I paid into a works pension.

SO MUCH FOR PROVIDING FOR OUR OLD AGE.

What makes me angry is there is no accountablility for the CEO's who have creamed all they could from the top. Did they think it was an endles pit? Who are these people that are suppose to protect our money in the bank? For years they have been boasting huge profits that the normal person would not even think of seeing in a lifetime...and now they say they are struggling to keep out of the red.

With elections coming here, and the situation at hand in the world, who can we trust anymore? I would like to fire the lot of them and get the youth coming into the workforce to take over
they could do not worse than what these so called professionals have done. "Money is the root of all Evil" sure has a good ring to it these days.

The world money markets are in all sorts of trouble because the banks, lending institutions etc. are not regulated.

If you go for a mortgage you have to sign all sorts of papers to cover the lender, You have to take out insurance to cover that mortgage, You are regulated for their benefit.

They won't take a chance on you and rightly so. Yet the whole world's money markets have no regulations on themselves, They can sell and re-sell insurance covers, mortgages and contracts to whom ever they like so that you never know where those contracts, mortgages and insurance covers end up, They don't even know themselves. What sort of business is it that don't keep track on all it's transactions. That's a recipe for bankruptcy and that's what has been happening with the banks and wheelers and dealers of this world. They are so bloody clever they have just about stuffed the whole worlds economies up. I think it's criminal that most of them are still allowed to carry on regardless, most of the silly buggers should be in jail in my book, but of course that won't happen. It's only when little Joe Bloggs does something wrong that they jump up and down until he is punished to the full extent of the law. There is no compassion for him nor is there any talk of a bail out for him. He's just the sucker who has to do the bailing out of the well heeled.

As I've said on here before there are basically 4 players that rule this corrupt world and that's The Banks, The Judiciary, The silly Pollies who are dictated to by the former and their lackies the media.

We are not out of the woods yet by a long shot.

Cymro.

Agree on that, Cymro. However, I did notice on the front page of last week's CV Leader that a woman was jailed for stealing £200,000 from clients of her employer. Now that is a reprensible crime by anyone's standards, and should not be taken lightly. A crime is a crime after all; it was theft pure and simple.

What struck me though was the irony that so far nobody in Britain has even been investigated for causing the financial mess we now find ourselves in. People's homes and jobs are at stake, caused by a far greater "theft" than that perpetrated by that woman reported in the Leader.

I just wonder though when a crime really is a crime. Does it depend on the amount you steal and\or the circumstances?

The main difference, Y Ddraenen, is that the woman guilty of stealing £200,000 did so by embezzling monies from accounts belonging to customers that she knew, and probably came into contact with at Mountain Ash Barclays Bank, unlike those that perpetrated the present banking crisis.
Otherwise, I quite agree, theft is a crime however one calls it and should be punished: we are all its victims.

In September 2002, during the dot-com post-mortem, New Yorker magazine published an article entitled "The Greed Cycle," lamenting the obscene levels of compensation that corporate executives had managed to extract from largely illusory businesses. From 1999 to 2001, the article noted, Global Crossing's Gary Winnick reaped $512 million, Enron's Kenneth Lay walked away with $246 million, and WorldCom's Scott Sullivan pocketed $49.4 million. All these companies collapsed, leaving their shareholders with worthless stock certificates.

Now, just a few years later, we are back where we were, railing against the huge amounts of pay that investment bankers collected while packaging and selling what turned out to be shoddy investment products.

Richard Fuld Jr., chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, made $34 million last year. His firm has since filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Angelo Mozilo, founder and CEO of Countrywide Financial, cashed in $122 million in stock options last year. He helped package and sell many of the subprime mortgages that precipitated the current financial crisis. When he left the bank in June 2006, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson collected a half-year bonus worth $18.7 million. The previous year, his bonus was more than double that. Under Paulson's stewardship, Goldman Sachs sold about $100 billion of subprime mortgage issues, the very investments that are befouling the financial system today. (The irony is that Paulson, in his current role as U.S. Treasury Secretary, is responsible for finding a way to clean up the very mess he helped create.)

Sometimes, executives don't have to do anything other than show up to collect huge gobs of money. Vikram Pandit, for example, was paid $200 million in signing bonuses and pay earlier this year when he became Citigroup's new CEO. On the other side of the turnstile, Stan O'Neal got a $161-million retirement package when he was ousted from Merrill Lynch in October.

We might be tempted to dismiss such extreme pay packages as aberrations, but the ugly truth is they are symptomatic of a growing gulf between the amounts we pay corporate executives versus rank-and-file employees. In 1973, the average CEO of a major U.S. company made about 45 times the average pay of their employees. By 1991, that figure had increased to 140. By last year, it was passing 262, according to Business Week.

In Canada, compensation levels are not as extreme, but they are still beyond the comprehension of most Canadian workers. In 2007, Royal Bank CEO Gordon Nixon earned $39 million, including stock options worth $29 million. Richard Waugh, CEO of Scotiabank, took home a total of almost $14 million last year, including options worth $7 million.

Both of these banks have been extremely profitable, which provides some justification for such stratospheric compensation levels. But most companies don't need justification. All they need are compensation consultants.

These consultants, although presumed to be independent, are routinely hired by companies to legitimize what I consider to be outrageous compensation packages.

They were used, for example, to legitimize the exorbitant amounts paid in cash and options to executives at Ballard Power, Angiotech Pharmaceuticals and Southwestern Resources, all based in Vancouver.

On several occasions, these executives made The Vancouver Sun's annual list of highest-paid B.C. executives. Unfortunately for shareholders who paid the freight, all three of these companies have been financial busts. Ballard has now racked up $921 million US in cumulative losses, while Angiotech has lost a total of $144 million US. Southwestern's assay results, which enabled its executives to reap millions in stock options, have turned out to be fraudulent.

That's the way it is with the greed cycle. It enables corporate executives to profit from financial failure, over and over again. It is capitalism's great flaw.

dbaines@vancouversun.com
Wednesday, October 15, 2008

So why don't they make this kind of information available at time of payout or even every quarter,so that the people know what actually is happening in the banks BEFORE they go under. The public can then choose whether they want their money at risk in their banks and can opt to withdraw their money before the CEO's do.

It's disgusting, have they no shame?